The State Legislature*

The Third House: Group Bills in the California State Legislature

The extent to which groups are involved in the legislative process and legislator decisionmaking is of interest to legislative scholars, but difficult to empirically study because of the private information exchanges between legislator and group. This article exploits a reporting institution in the California state legislature to explore group involvement in the policymaking process and legisla...

Computers in the Legislature

Hawaii state legislature--Act 228 medical marijuana law.

Power in the US Legislature

Using a standard model of the US legislative system as a monotonic simple game, we look at rankings of the four types of players – the president, the vice president, senators, and representatives – induced by power indices. We show that regardless of the power index used, the president is always ranked above the other players, and a senator is always ranked above the vice president and a repres...

E-mail Communication and the Policy Process in the State Legislature

E-mail has changed the policy process in state legislatures because political actors now have a new way to present their message to state legislators. What little research has been conducted on this topic examines e-mail communication generally and does not compare results by policy actor. Using an original survey of state legislators in eight states, we test for systematic effects of variables...